Own Your Future: How to Think Like an Entrepreneur and Thrive in an Unpredictable Economy

PREFACE

The world doesn’t need another book about entrepreneurs. The world does, however, need a book on how to navigate the complexity, uncertainty, and risks of modern work life—and that is what you will find here.

As you will read, we hold up the experiences of serial entrepreneurs—those individuals who have created at least two successful ventures—as role models. Why? Because there is nothing more uncertain than starting a business, and serial entrepreneurs are masters at it.

The question motivating us as we set out to write this book was straightforward: How can those of us who don’t necessarily want to start businesses of our own apply what serial entrepreneurs have learned about navigating uncertainty in order to increase the odds for success in our personal and professional lives?

Like many people, you may never have thought of yourself as an entrepreneur, or even that entrepreneurship has any relationship to your life. But the capacity to think and act entrepreneurially has increasingly become a critical life skill—vital in a world where the levels of uncertainty are high and the challenges that uncertainty causes are daunting.

What serial entrepreneurs have in common is making uncertainty work to their advantage. As you will see, what works for them will work for you as well, and it isn’t as hard as you think. You actually knew what to do when you were an infant, and you unlearned it when you went through an education process that is entirely rooted in how to manage our lives in a predictable world. In the pages ahead, we will help you rediscover how you can regain the core skills of thinking and acting entrepreneurially.

SMALL, SMART STEPS

Central to this book are the benefits of smart action. Decades of research—most notably by Saras Sarasvathy of the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business—and everyday observation show that the best entrepreneurs don’t overthink and worry about all possible outcomes. They consciously and deliberately take small, smart steps toward their goal.

We’ll summarize for you how they do this, and reveal how they evaluate what they learn from taking those small, smart steps, and how what they learn shapes what they do next.

As you will see, we looked at how entrepreneurs actually behave—rejecting the myths and misconceptions about the lives of entrepreneur superstars. Instead, we drew upon the entrepreneurial life experiences of all kinds of people (not just entrepreneurs) and the array of tools and approaches they employed to succeed, so that we all can learn from these experiences as well.

So, think of this book as an owner’s manual for having a more successful life. We’re not all going to become entrepreneurs as traditionally defined, but we must all still think and act the way they do. In today’s uncertain world, this is the surest path to achieving what we want—in work and all aspects of our lives.

Like most things in life, our thinking about all this is a work in progress. You can follow how it evolves at the blog Paul writes for Forbes: Action Trumps Everything, http://www.forbes.com/sites/actiontrumpseverything/.

INTRODUCTION

We Love the Idea. It’s Just Too Darn Depressing to Publish.

If you hit me over the head long enough, the message will finally get through.

That, in fifteen words, sums up the long, roundabout trip I took in order to bring this book into being.

But it was well worth the journey. Let me explain.

A couple of years ago Len Schlesinger, Charlie Kiefer, and I wrote a book called Just Start: Take Action, Embrace Uncertainty, Create the Future. We addressed what organizations and people should do when they don’t know what to do, and laid out a course of action to follow when you or your organization are faced with uncertainty.

Today, one of the most uncertain things imaginable is trying to predict whether you’re going to have a job in five years. So, that’s our focus this time around. Specifically, we set off to answer this question: How can you create a prosperous career in an economic world that is being radically reshaped in real time?

It turns out to be an extremely important question because it looks to us like there are only three types of people who can depend on continuing employment. They are:

1. Skilled tradesmen. For people working in a skilled trade, like plumbers and electricians, the only concern, other than the overall health of the economy—which, of course, is no small thing—is the increasing trend toward using plug-in parts. (When customers can do the work themselves—quickly, safely, and for less cost—there is little reason to hire you.)

2. People who can live with how their profession is evolving. There is always going to be a demand for nurses and teachers, for example. And if you can accept the trends—heavier workloads and more online (as opposed to face-to-face) interactions—then you can continue as you are. You might grow progressively unhappy in the job (This is not why I signed up to be a nurse; I hate teaching to the test), but if you are good, you will have a job in a field that will sort of, kind of resemble the one you entered.

3. People who can coast safely into the sunset. This scenario used to be far more prevalent than it is today. There were employees who would, in essence, retire in place five or even sometimes ten years before their official retirement age. Today, some companies are still nice enough to allow long-time valued employees to coast, but it is likely going to be for five or ten months (and it is far from being a guarantee).

But these are the only exceptions we found. If you work in an industry that is in total flux (publishing or music) or starting to unravel (finance), or one that you suspect might soon change radically—or, if your career has recently been upended (or soon might be) or has never really gotten going, or you feel stuck and frustrated—your job is probably going away.

But it doesn’t have to be that depressing.

THE GOOD NEWS . . .

Talking to people who are coping successfully with all this turmoil—and reading the research being done, especially the work of Saras Sarasvathy, who teaches at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia—turned up some extremely good news. There is a way to deal with all this upheaval and come out in a potentially much better place than you are today. The solution is to act the way successful entrepreneurs do. Not by necessarily starting your own company—although as we will discuss, that is certainly an option—but by approaching your career the way successful entrepreneurs handle the unknown.

When people write about entrepreneurs, they invariably focus on their behavior: What did Howard Schultz or Michael Dell or Martha Stewart do to build their companies? If you take that approach, you probably would conclude that every entrepreneur is unique, and so there is little to be learned from studying them; that is, you would have to be Howard Schultz to start Starbucks, Michael Dell to create Dell, and Martha Stewart to begin the company she did.

And, you’d be right.

But—and it is a huge but—if instead of looking at their behavior, you look at how the most successful entrepreneurs think, you will find amazing similarities in how they reason, approach obstacles, and take advantage of opportunities. And it’s from examining that pattern that we can all benefit, because it will give us a set of tools we can use to deal with the increasing amount of uncertainty we face.

Here’s the path they usually take.

1. What they set out to do is what they want to do. While passion was not absolutely required, before they started they had real, honest-to-goodness desire. In other words, as they got their business underway, the feeling was substantially more than it seems like a good idea.

2. They quickly take a small step toward their goal . . . using whatever means they have at hand. They don’t want to over-commit or move so far so fast that they can’t recover. Equally important, they don’t spend a lot of time asking what if or thinking about what might happen. They take a small step toward what they desire and find out.

3. After taking that small step, they stop to see what they have learned. Maybe they learn that their initial goal is still a good one. Maybe the market is telling them that they need to go in another direction. Maybe they discover that they don’t have the desire anymore. Maybe, after considering what they have learned after taking that first small step, they realize there is something else they would much rather do. The point is, they always pause and reflect after each step they take toward their goal.

4. Once they understand what they’ve learned, they take another small step . . . and go through the cycle again.

In other words, the formula for success (if there is one) is figuring out what you truly want to do. Then, once you know: Act. Learn. Then Build (off of what you find). And then Repeat (the process).

There is a proven path for dealing with uncertainty: Proceed as proven entrepreneurs do. After all, there is nothing more uncertain than starting a business, and these people have done it successfully. What has worked for them will work for you.

This ALBR * process continues until you are happy with the result, or you decide that you don’t want to (or can’t afford to) go on.

The way that entrepreneurs approach uncertainty is a plausible—and perhaps even perfect—way of preparing for an uncertain economic future. It is a more practical replacement for the traditional career planning that we all know.

We’ll explore this idea in detail in Chapter 2, but let’s just touch on it here. You know how traditional career planning works: You imagine what job you want to have at a fixed point in the future—say, five years from now—and then work backward from there, figuring out what you have to do to get from where you are now to where you want to be. What classes you need to take, for instance, and what job assignments, and the like.

The problem with this approach is that it does you absolutely no good if your industry goes away. Let’s say you were an assistant store manager at Blockbuster who was planning on being a regional manager in five years. When the industry was stable you would carve out a path that probably looked like this: You would become an associate store manager in year one, store manager in year three, and regional manager (in charge of a bunch of stores) in year five. But all that planning goes for naught if your video chain—and all the others—go under. In an environment where that is likely to happen, traditional career planning is useless.

So, how should that Blockbuster employee, let’s call her Kayla, determine what she should do next? Here’s what she would do if she followed the ALBR model.

She’d start by figuring out what she wants to do.

Well, she started working at Blockbuster because she truly loves movies and introducing people to some of her favorites (and learning from them about gems she might have missed). Where else could she do that? She took a number of small steps to find out.

Step 1. She approached a couple of the big cinema chains but quickly learned her primary job there would be to push as many high-margin soft drinks and snacks as possible. Movies would be an afterthought, and the decision about what to show was always made at corporate. Working in a theater, she would have no input on what was shown. That wasn’t what she wanted to do. And so on to the next small step.

Step 2. The independent/foreign movie theaters were too snooty for her taste. Kayla believes movies are to be shared and celebrated. Your opinion of them, she argues, should not be used to belittle someone who wouldn’t know a pan wipe—a shot where a stationary camera turns horizontally, revealing a new scene—from a pan of chicken. Another dead end.

Step 3. She talked to people who ran various film studies departments and those who had earned an MFA (master of fine arts degree), and while the idea of receiving credit for watching movies was appealing, she really didn’t see what she would be able to do with the degree that she couldn’t do now. So, that wasn’t an option, either.

In each of these cases there was neither a huge investment of time or resources in trying to determine what career path to follow. Instead of spending hours and hours researching, planning, and searching who, exactly, to mail her résumé to, Kayla simply called around and talked to friends of friends. She took small steps and learned from each one. The learning in these cases was negative, in the sense that she learned she didn’t love any of the ideas she came up with—although knowing what you don’t want to do can be extremely valuable.

However, in the course of all her small steps, she met Peter, a recent MBA, who was convinced that there was a market for a revival house in town. It would be the sort of place that could show the great old movies on a huge screen. He had worked out the numbers—and it definitely looked like you could turn a profit—and found the perfect location. But after saying he really loved Casablanca, Citizen Kane, Stagecoach, and Unforgiven, Peter hadn’t a clue about what kind of movies to show.

When last we checked, Kayla and Peter have joined forces, and we have to admit their preliminary programming decisions—Femme Fatale Fridays and Weird Wednesdays—sound appealing. They expect to have their grand opening, complete with klieg lights firing into the sky and a red carpet for local celebrities like the mayor, soon.

Kayla’s story is a good one. But how do we know that the Act. Learn. Build. Repeat. model is the right path for dealing with all the economic uncertainty we face?

Well, of course, we can’t know for sure. We are dealing with the unknown (i.e., what is going to happen in the global marketplace), so there are no guarantees. But, the approach certainly resonates.

Convinced that I was onto something, I came up with a title that I loved: Thriving in the Pink Slip Economy. I started talking to my friends, some of whom are book editors, and everyone said it was an extremely big idea and would make a terrific book. I was thrilled. And then